embraced ovenbird I belong to this jungle. I was born here and I’ll die here when something sees fit to suck the air from my lungs. In the meantime I show tourists what it’s like to breathe and they pay me well for my work. There were days, long ago, when oxygen was plentiful, but humans never learned the lesson of Easter Island, and so we burned through the air like we burned through the fossil fuels and now there’s nothing left. The air is thin and seeded with ash, and the diatoms are dead or dying, and forests are approaching mythological status. I protect this one with my life, or what’s left of it, anyway. A man has travelled a long distance to sip this tree’s rarest vintage: oxygen straight from the source and leaves slick with humidity, so green you can taste it. To drink the air you need to climb into the canopy. I act as a guide, a kind of arborial sherpa. The man who comes to me today is equipped with a backpack and is wearing safari-style khakis. His hair is pulled into a short ponytail. He’s not young and I worry that he has underestimated the difficulty of the climb. The day starts out well enough. He’s spry, despite one bad knee, but things turn suddenly just past the understory. He slips on a mossy branch and tumbles ten feet, slowed only by the slash of twigs and the tangle of vines. It’s his backpack that saves him. The straps catch and he hangs from the tree’s rough arms like a puppet. I observe his body, still, like a caterpillar preparing to build a chrysalis, but he is breathing so I dare to hope. The world zooms out then and I see everything as if from afar—the rivets of his pack warping, the stitches that hold the straps tearing. I return to my own mind and descend as quickly as I can to the place where he is swaying in the light breeze. As I approach, one of the vines unhinges its jaw and flicks out its tongue, revealing itself to be a python and not a vine at all. I assess the situation. The python is coiling itself around his chest and while this is, I admit, a problem, the snake is also preventing him from falling to his death. I smile a little. Isn’t it true that sometimes the things that could easily swallow us whole are also the things that save us? I’m thinking about love, the way it has, all at once, scooped out my heart like the flesh from an avocado and, even as I lay soaked in the blood of my own dismay, sealed my wounds with honey. The snake tightens its grip. Who can tell the difference between an embrace that soothes and an embrace that suffocates? One can slide into the other easily enough. I shake free of my musings and turn back to the man. The snake makes a bridge of its body that spans the expanse between life and death. And while I can’t know for certain (because who can ever be certain in this dying world?) I think that he will live. I think that he has time enough to fill his lungs with whatever is left of the dissolving air. 251208 what's it to you? who go blather from